


weathered

by enemeriad



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Mutual Pining, Spoilers for S5 Mid-Season Finale, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 16:11:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4712243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enemeriad/pseuds/enemeriad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you have wanted everything from him and yet asked for nothing. When you have expected more yet never divulged so, how can you say he's just a friend?</p>
            </blockquote>





	weathered

**Author's Note:**

  * For [onlywordsnow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onlywordsnow/gifts).



> This wouldn't have happened if not for the tireless effort of those who know me better than I know myself and their niceness. 
> 
> This was written for the prompt - 'but you say he's just a friend'.

When it is no longer I but we, when it is easier to imagine drowning than leaving, when it is rational to wrap your heart around his and to say: come what may, When it is his house, his bed, his cologne around your collarbones.

But you say he's just a friend.

 

 

You will wake up one morning, four years into your job, and despite the ongoing difficulty of everything in your lives, you will know if he asks you to stay, to go with him to Pearson Hardman. There are old playbills on your kitchen counter and there are unanswered calls from your Agent but you can't bring yourself to return the calls. Its a guilty sense of quashing ambition. 

You talk about professional development and best legal secretary in the city, thank you and its the same kind of thing right? You play a part, every single day. You tell yourself, we're just colleagues.

 

 

When it is three in the morning and you are standing on the threshold of your balcony, when the air is colder than the loneliness but he has called you fourteen times in the last hour and you miss him like summer in winter. 

When you pass a man on the street with the same perfume, that fresh, crisp scent and you catch yourself turning back, just to check, just to make sure. 

When you wear that dress, those shoes and curl your hair just so because remember, once, a long time ago, he said, perhaps flippantly, perhaps to ease you into submission over a request, he said, 'you look nice today.'

But you say he's just a friend. 

 

 

 

You will take them to bed, sure, and between the hours of three and four in the morning perhaps they will satiate but when it is daybreak and the sun is streaming over your denial you will not be able to lie to yourself so easily. 

You will imagine marrying them - a tactic for survival - you will paint mental doorstops in periwinkle and cover thresholds in perennials. You will tuck children into beds and you will conquer Manhattan with your sheer force of will. 

But you will not be able to stop yourself from seeing  _his_ tie on the edge of the bed,  _his_ laugh at your dinner party. 

You will tell yourself, it is just fantasy. And yes, but-

 

 

 

When you find out about the anxiety - and you do, eventually, painfully, ignorantly, indelicately (and you are so mad at yourself for  _not_ knowing) - when you find out about the therapy - and you do, and in the same track it is just as awful, just as disappointed in yourself and you love him like a song stuck in your head. 

When you find yourself sitting across from the woman that now knows him better than you and you say-

When you try not to superimpose what  _you_ want on the situation and yet you find yourself saying, 'he doesn't know what he's missing.'

But you say he's just a friend.

 

 

 

You will cultivate an armour and it will be immutable. You will be delighted and supportive and you will not want what he cannot give you. 

You will wait but you will not  _wait_ because he is not a child almost grown, he is a man and you cannot change what is not yours to change. So this is not some sort of twisted masochism, this is life. He is not yours. You are not his. There is just two people, two separate entities, two names - unattached, separated by a comma if ever in a list.

Because you know it will hurt - it would, you have imagined this too, - not because he is not ready but because he is not right.

 

 

 

When you run the scenario like that, when you twist the pedestal you've placed him on to ensure his imaginary failure to your imaginary test. 

When you want so badly to show him how to change but you want nothing to sway the outcome. When you want but you don't want to ruin  _this, it, us._

But you say he's just a friend. 

 

 

 

You will age together with anything but grace and time will not grant synchronicity but this painful, jarring distance - 47 paces from his desk to yours (you've counted and counted and,) - now the  _before_ is more distance, more silence, more  _how did I not see?_

You will come to him, late at night, sit across the table from him and cry because Mike is 45 to life and did you ever see a girl so broken as Rachel in court today? Did you? 

And you will still feel so far away from him but a little closer, a little better because you share this together. 

'I shouldn't have winked,' you will say and it will be the wrong thing in the right moment and he will not laugh but he will hand you a glass of whiskey and he will not let go of your hand. 

 

 

 

 

When you can no longer stomach the sight of a lawyer, when justice has so wrongly been executed. When the prospects of a wonderful, stupid, excellent boy are taken. 

When Harvey is disbarred and you are standing on the roof of what once was, once used to be, the company (-and it engulfs you, that thick emotion at  _what we made, we ruined-)_ and Jessica can't look at either of you because it is not losing family, it is family lost. 

When Daniel Hardman is standing in your foyer and Louis has not answered a call in 4 weeks. 

When Harvey has slept on your couch for a fortnight because you both know it would be worse alone, but you say you're just friends. 

 

 

 

You know that in crisis people find people. You know that humans are social creatures. You know that this is a product of stress and lack of sleep and fear. 

You know that the moment you push him, gently, timidly, almost expecting his denial, into your bedroom that it will be _it_. Precipices upon fantasies upon fear of rebuke upon desire. 

But you don't know that when his fingers grip your waist and pull you into him, it will unknot the fear at the base of your spine, it will feel like the quiet during snow, the calm before rain. It will feel like everything you didn't imagine. 

 

 

 

When you have relived  _that night_ like an opiate on those evenings where you could not stretch your excuses the length of your love, when it does not measure to  _this_ night. 

When you try to tell yourself it is not just Mike, not just tragedy that was the catalyst but you find him broken and battered and 'how many more?' and he is on your bathroom floor and you don't know if he's talking about people he thinks he's failed or legal battles. 

When you sink to the floor beside him and let him cry and know that maybe  _this_ is not  _it_ but its enough. 

 

 

 

You will let him go even though he doesn't ask. You know it is what he wants. 

You will not find the time to extrapolate on the circumstances - that moment comes later - instead, you will fall back into old routines and separate lives and after a few weeks you will dial out his phone number and then slam it shut. 

You will try not to wonder but it is  _in your nature_ and so, much, much time will pass before he will come to your home, one morning, drowning in alcohol fumes and looking at you in equal parts disgust and salvation. 

You will pull him inside before his sneers wake the neighbours and coax aspirin down his throat. You will ignore his bitterness. 

'This mess,' he will say and you will agree because perhaps your job was not to change him but to  _let_ him. 

 

 

 

When things have changed but not  _quite._ A change of state is legitimated by a label. Gas to water to ice, you say to yourself. 

When it is dinners that linger into weekends away and occasions that legitimate your attendance as plus one, secretary, whatever. 

So, really, things have not changed. 

When he has a drawer but not a key, so. 

You still say you're just friends

 

 ( _for now.)_


End file.
